Johanns meets with Japanese over U.S. beef

By Christopher Doering

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Japanese consumers are leery of
eating U.S. beef and it could take months to rebuild their
confidence after a shipment of veal was found with forbidden
material, five lawmakers from Japan’s minority party said after
meeting Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns on Tuesday.

The delegation, members of the opposition Democratic Party,
handed Johanns a letter that described the event as “a serious
problem that cannot be dismissed as a simple mistake.”

“We had a very heated discussion,” Japanese Congressman
Takashi Shinohara told reporters after meeting Johanns. “Many,
many different consumers distrust the American way of
inspection.”

Tokyo suspended trade on January 20 after its inspectors
found part of a calf’s backbone — prohibited under a
U.S.-Japan agreement — in a veal shipment from New York. It
was only a month after Japan ended a two-year ban on U.S. beef.

The Japanese lawmakers also met the chairmen of the Senate
and House Agriculture committees.

The Democratic Party had called for Japan’s agriculture
minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, to resign after he acknowledged on
Monday that Japan had only begun inspecting meat plants in the
United States after lifting the ban.

Last November, the cabinet had promised the government
would inspect U.S. meatpacking plants to ensure they complied
with agreed procedures before imports resumed.

“I am not considering leaving my post,” Nakagawa told a
news conference on Tuesday.

Johanns said even if Japanese inspectors had visited the
Atlantic Veal and Lamb plant where the meat was shipped from,
it was unlikely they would have detected the mistake.

Japan was the No. 1 buyer of American beef until December
2003 when the United States discovered its first case of mad
cow disease.

Johanns described the meeting with Japanese lawmakers as a
“candid, frank discussion.”

“We want to be very transparent about this,” he added.

Officials in Japan say imports will not resume until after
the United States submits a report on how the incident occurred
and steps are taken to prevent it from happening again.

In the letter to Johanns, the delegation said the United
States also must meet other conditions, including implementing
traceability for all beef and retraining inspectors.

“Once they are cleared, we are open to having beef imported
into Japan as much as possible,” said Kenji Yamaoka, vice
president of the Democratic Party of Japan.

USDA has vowed to conduct a thorough investigation of the
incident and impose stricter scrutiny of U.S. meat plants by
conducting surprise inspections and requiring two inspectors to
review each export shipment.

The USDA has declined to estimate when the investigation
would be completed, but Johanns said he would not “sacrifice
thoroughness for speed.”

Japan requires all U.S. beef it imports to be free of the
brains, spinal columns and other nervous tissue most at risk of
carrying the infective agent for mad cow disease. The United
States has said the materials found in the New York shipment
pose no threat when derived from the younger animals used in
trade with Japan.

The United States has struggled to rebuild its beef export
market which totaled $3.8 billion annually three years ago.
Only recently have South Korea and Hong Kong, previously the
third-largest and fifth-largest overseas markets, respectively,
eased their bans on U.S. beef.

Last week, Taiwan announced it would resume imports of
boneless beef from American cattle under 30 months as long as
the meat does not contain specified risk material such as brain
or spinal material.

(Additional reporting by Charles Abbott in Washington and
Teruaki Ueno in Tokyo)